Three Nepalese porters drop their loads near Nandanvan, a popular meadow in northern India's Gangotri basin. It's a blustery mid-September afternoon, the humid monsoon air snapped cold with a belt of wind. The men decide to continue on to Badrinath, on the far side of Kalindi Pass, to find shelter. They've made the trek in bad weather before, but this storm is different. Visibility drops and they're enveloped in a nighttime blizzard that cloaks the range in three feet of snow. Unable to navigate, they huddle beneath their shawls and blankets, hoping to find the trail with first light. But it never comes. The men die of exposure.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008: THREE IN A BED MADE FOR TWO
A few miles away and thousands of feet higher, the same storm found me crammed into a two-man portaledge with Renan Ozturk and Jimmy Chin. We were less than halfway up the 4,000-foot east face of Meru Central, a mountain that rises above the Gangotri basin to 20,702 feet, some 400 feet higher than Denali, the highest point in North America. Meru is a hydra-headed massif, with multiple summits; our goal was to climb the most dramatic of these, a blade of pale, steep granite aptly named the Shark's Fin. But on this afternoon the weather had turned nasty, and our portaledge—basically an aluminum-framed nylon cot with a tent drawn over it—afforded little rest. Hammered by high winds, our entire world bucked wildly against the cams and pitons holding us to the wall. The ice we'd climbed to reach this point wasn't particularly solid, a bad sign for what lay ahead. On this, our third day on the wall, it was still too early to call it quits. Our only option was to hang tough and wait. Renan, who's 28 and lives in Colorado, saw our misery as value added. "I guess I've earned my claustrophobia, festering, and circulation-loss merit badges," he said.

"Yeah, it's a burly storm, but at least we're freezing," Jimmy deadpanned as he melted chunks of wall ice with our stove to make water. "It could be a lot worse."

I chuckled as the flapping tent fly beat against Jimmy's head.